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Hello Stovers!<br>
<br>
I haven't posted for a long time, but reading the Stovelist is still
a real pleasure to me: lively debates, breakthrough stove science,
many people working on many initiatives, with a lot of energy,
that's great to see, that's emulating!<br>
Sorry for the long email, but there are here a few ideas I wanted to
develop.<br>
<br>
It's been some time since I wanted to share this article from the
Guardian, it was sent to me by Minh, a previous colleague of mine,
who also worked on the GERES project in Cambodia. I don't think it
has been shared on this list, but I think it talks about just the
most fundamental of our problems:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/cookstoves-design-poor-communities-refugees-unhcr-ikea">http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/cookstoves-design-poor-communities-refugees-unhcr-ikea</a><br>
<br>
"<b>With all the knowledge and technology we have at our disposal,
why is it proving so difficult to design and create simple and
efficient cookstoves for the three billion people who use them in
the developing world?</b>"<br>
is the question asked by T. Alexander Aleinikoff, the United Nations
deputy high commissioner for refugees.<br>
<br>
The question I would have is more the following: "why don't we know
why it is proving so difficult?"<br>
I mean, after decades of stove development and dissemination,
there's at least one thing we should know, it's where our
difficulties come from!<br>
<br>
But here's a tentative answer to Mr Aleinikoff question: the
principles behind biomass combustion make it extremely difficult to
do stoves that are both cheap and practical, and very clean. But,
like anything, I believe this is not impossible, and this is a
problem we are working on tackling.<br>
And for now, when a stove developer decides to make a stove, he/she
chooses almost systematically the latter aspect: clean combustion.
You know the rest of the story: the stove is expensive and
impractical to use, barely good enough to boil water for tea, and
users don't buy it or use it.<br>
I'm being caricatural but this is what happens too often.<br>
<br>
<br>
<i><b>Stove science is lagging behind, not stove marketing</b></i><br>
<br>
I have done a great deal of reading since I've started working on
stoves, years ago. Reports are piling in our digital library at
Prakti. We will keep reading and piling them, for sure. At the same
time I have been trying to extract the very nectar of these reports,
and try to get an understanding of what really matters.<br>
<br>
In my opinion the stove sector knows what works in terms of
dissemination, distribution and marketing. Most of the reports are
about marketing and business models. Marketing to the BOP is very
well documented. It seems to me that every new edition of Boiling
Point from HEDON talks about this or that project: involve women
vendors, demonstrate the stoves, pay attention to early adopters and
opinion leaders, use mobile phone technologies, listen to the
feedback, find financing solutions, etc. I think we know all that.
And some projects are working great. You do good marketing, you make
a lot of efforts, you reap the rewards.<br>
But all agree it starts with one thing, it starts with a great
product.<br>
<br>
This is where the stove sector is lagging behind. No offense meant
to all the great researchers working on stoves.<br>
Stove marketing is currently waiting for stove science. Stove
science is lagging behind, because as I mentioned stove science is
so complex. Many challenges come with clean combustion. Marketers
wait for scientists to sort a few things out: scientifically
correct, and scientifically relevant protocols first. Then A LOT of
testing will be necessary, a lot of data, to understand combustion,
to understand variables, to understand stoves. Then, good design,
good engineering, great products. Once the great products are there,
salers and marketers and project implementers are reading to pick
them up, and to sell them to the BOP.<br>
A side note: I'd love to see HEDON and similar publications focus
more on the hard science, and how to help it, to accelerate it.
These are questions worth writing about.<br>
<br>
So what I call a great stove is not a Tier-4 stove that works
perfectly in controlled testing settings. I am gonna be again very
caricatural: Tier-4 is accessory, it is bonus.<br>
A great product is simply product a customer loves, buys and uses. A
great stove is a stove that is used.<br>
<br>
Some of you certainly experienced that: you give one day your new
prototype to a woman user. Skeptical at first, she agrees to leave
her traditional stove for a week, and start using your new stove.
You come back one week later. She is using it every day, for lunch
and dinner. She loves it. She put her ceramic stove on the side,
actually, it is nowhere to be seen. Your new stove has become the
kitchen stove.<br>
It's only for experiencing this kind of feeling that I work so hard.
This is when this happen to you that you know you have a great
stove. Adoption.<br>
<br>
<br>
<i><b>Cookstoves: super practical vs super clean </b></i><br>
<br>
I picture the stove sector as a large mountain, with 2 camps on its
two feet. The 2 camps are separated by the mountain in the middle.<br>
• In one camp the infamous smoky traditional stoves, and very
next to them, the vast majority of users, using them every day<br>
• In the other camp, stove developers and manufacturers, reaching
Tier-4 in their expensive labs, with complex technologies and
expensive stoves. And their very limited dissemination numbers.<br>
<br>
The 2 camps don't communicate much with each other. What happens is
that often a new recruit joins the stove developer camp. He/she
chooses the techno-push approach. The new comer comes up with a
slick design, cool materials, excellent lab results. But many
restrictions are imposed to the product use, it should take this
fuel, not this fuel, be lit this way, be tended this way, etc. And
as Crispin was mentioning in one of his last posts, so many
important things are left during the development process.<br>
Great disappointment is the reward of so much of work when the users
don't accept the new product.<br>
<br>
Priya Karve rightly emphasizes the importance of delivering a
cooking service, not a cooking stove. At Prakti we work on the
"cookstove system" (stove + fuel + cooking vessel + operator + burn
cycle). Traditional stoves give an excellent cooking service! They
are great cooking tools! They are just awfully dangerous for health.<br>
<br>
<br>
<i><b>Next actions: a few ideas</b></i><br>
<br>
I believe both camps can meet together, on top of this mountain.
There'll be extremely clean and usable stoves, hopefully soon. There
is some good progress happening already.<br>
<br>
But to be sure to succeed, I would start my climb at the basecamp
where all users already are.<br>
<br>
What I think stove developers should do:<br>
<br>
• Change your perspective: consider that traditional stoves are
great. That they are fantastic. Because people have been using them
for thousand of years. They must have something special, right?
Start by not judging them.<br>
• Spend a lot of time with the users. See them cooking. Cook
yourself, cook on the traditional stove. See how easy it is with the
traditional stove.<br>
• Then build your own stove based on the traditional stove. Big
stove, easy to use, sturdy, large opening, easy to tend, large
combustion chamber, lot of power, fast to cook.
Give it to users.
Have them use it, have them like it.<br>
• Your stove is being used everyday, it is being adopted.
Congratulations! Additionally, you might have seen by now, and your
future customers remarked it too, that the new stove, even if it's
far from being Tier 4, is actually much less smoky than the
traditional stove..<br>
• You've reached your usability baseline, that's your
prerequisite, the bar has been set. Don't cross it now. Always keep
the stove as usable.<br>
• Set a bar also for price. Keep the stove cheap. Its production
must be affordable. This is a prerequisite too.<br>
• From there: work on improving performance: emissions and wood
savings. It will be difficult. But you can improve it, by a lot.<br>
• If you are working on a breakthrough technology, see how you
can introduce it to your usable cheap stove, without lowering the
bar you set.<br>
• Work on the breakthrough technology in isolation, if necessary.
If the technology is not ready to be engineered into a good stove,
so be it.<br>
<br>
At Prakti, this is what we are currently doing, working both on
incremental progress, and breakthrough technologies. Both are
difficult, but both hold promises.
I was saying previously that
stove marketing was waiting for stove science. In fact, it's not. It
cannot wait. Stove are being sold, marketed, for better of for
worse. Funders, programme managers, private companies, want to see
stoves in the field, they want to see numbers.<br>
<br>
Now, in my picture, I didn't mention that great projects, not only
in humanitarian context, are on the other side of the mountain, they
have chosen to improve traditional cookstoves, with simple design
changes. GERES, GIZ, SNV among others have worked on such projects.
Materials must be found locally, price must be cheap. Local artisans
must be the manufacturers of the stove. They have had great success,
large numbers disseminated.<br>
<br>
This is a proven approach, but what I advocate is to go even
further, and businesses and manufacturers are part of that.<br>
It is not to improve a traditional stove, but to develop a new
stove, that has the same qualities as this traditional stove. This
is a small nuance. And work on making this stove clean.<br>
The approach is to use much more science, much more engineering. To
think in business terms. Make a product which can be
mass-manufactured, which can be scalable. Our customers love the
portability of our stoves, this is for example something we want to
keep.<br>
<br>
It is said there is not one-size-fits all. That's debatable. Have
you seen how similar mud stoves in Africa, in Asia look like? Close
to the ground, big front opening. Why is the Jiko such a hit, all
over Africa? Isn't the 3 stone fire the world's most successful
one-size-fits all model?<br>
<br>
We need funding to go to R&D. This is something I advocated at
the Clean Cooking Forum in Delhi last October 2015, and is still
very actual to me. At Prakti we've been very lucky to have funding
from the GACC and other funders for our R&D work. It helped a
lot. This needs to continue, and on a much larger scale.<br>
Radha Muthiah rightly says in the article that, these are the
article words, "the market is fragmented, with a lot of small and
medium-sized entrepreneurs who may not have the appropriate design
and manufacturing skills". I fully agree with that. A possible way
to address this issue is to fund work that can benefit to the whole
sector, especially R&D work. Besides testing and protocols,
works on materials, work on design, work on combustion. Crispin said
in the volume 69, issue 8, that the long term future of stove
materials is glass and ceramic, and more investment should go in the
research on those. There are several areas that research can
explore.<br>
<br>
Companies sell shampoo to the BOP, they sell soft drinks. Here in
India, cheap smartphones are everywhere. A lot of R&D money has
been spent so these products could be made, and now successful
technologies and successful marketing go hand-in-hand.<br>
There is no reason that we cannot achieve that soon as well with
cookstoves.<br>
<br>
Xavier Brandao<br>
<br>
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